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About this project

Farm Trekkers is documentary project to find stories about
food being grown differently around the world, and the people behind the
processes. Our curiosity was originally piqued by these stories given our
interest in the burgeoning “organic revolution” in the States, and we had plans
to travel the world in 2012. What to do with said interest, travel plans, and a
video camera? Voila. Farm Trekkers was born.

We spent the first five months of this year in South America
finding and filming people farming differently. The stories we found range from
biologists turning to radical permaculture as a way to reclaim native land, to
indigenous communities that farm organically simply because it’s the way
they’ve always worked.

We think that these stories are especially pertinent as the
debate at home heats up about processed foods, agribusiness, and
sustainability. The more we all learn about traditional methods of agriculture—and
the reasons behind them—the closer we become to our food, even in a world that
seemingly pushes us farther from it.

Several of these methods, however, are fading. Children are
moving away from traditional ways of life, and the threat of globalization and
commercial farming has begun to effect even the remotest of communities. The
time to tell these stories is now.

We learned quite a bit from our experiences in South
America, and now we're headed to Asia. To keep the project going here we have a whole new set of challenges: translators, for one. (Note: We're not just going to be in Bangkok—we'll hopefully be shooting in India, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.)We’ve discovered ways of getting access
to impressively off-the-beaten-track locations, and want to continue to be able
to do this. We also need some new basic equipment—such as extra camera
batteries, a tripod, and computer memory—to be able to keep producing and
editing these shorts on the road.

Farm Trekkers isn’t only
about what’s happening abroad. We plan, in 2013, to bring our newfound
skills and experience back and focus on stories closer to home. The goal is to
put out a long-form documentary by the end of 2013, and then, in 2014 and
beyond, to return to some of these communities and more elaborately and
eloquently tell their stories before it’s too late.

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